Tenet: It's Good And Bad

The first time I watched Christopher Nolan's "Tenet" when it premiered on HBO Max, I was probably in the same boat that most everyone else was: utterly and completely lost, adrift in a twilight world where we, as the audience, couldn't even begin to put the pieces together and understand what the movie was even about. Once the credits rolled, I just sat in my chair and went...

...." what?"

In short, I wasn't able to follow the incredibly complex plot of the film, and this made me initially hate it. So, for a couple of years, I let the film lie and went about my business. However, earlier this summer, on a whim, a friend and I decided to sit down, re-watch the film, and take notes on it in an attempt to understand it. After much writing, much pausing of the movie, and many, many queries on Google to try and fill in the blanks, I found myself strangely satisfied with the movie. Once I figured out what the heck was going on, all of the pieces fell into place like a perfect puzzle, and even though the film was still far from perfect, even when I finally understood it, I was actually able to admire it for its immaculate attention to detail and uncanny ability to recall former events as well as set up future ones to piece together a coherent, endlessly complicated, and quite frankly, incredibly impressive plot. However, as it says in the title of this article, "Tenet" is both good and bad, and today, I'm going to explain why.

So, what makes "Tenet" a good movie? The plot. I'm going to try to explain it to you, so don't get lost on me. Believe me: it's easy to. "Tenet" follows a protagonist who is literally named "Protagonist" as he goes on a mission to save the world from destruction. At the beginning of the film, the protagonist and some of his colleagues disguise themselves as members of KORD, a Ukrainian hostage situation response team, to retrieve an artifact from an Opera House in Kyiv during a staged hostage situation. At one point in the siege, he is discovered by a real member of KORD who is seems is going to summarily execute him, but is then saved by a mysterious man with a trinket tied to a red string on his backpack, who then promptly disappears. The Protagonist goes on to successfully exfiltrate the artifact, but his team is captured and tortured by some militants in opposition to them. Our protagonist swallows a suicide pill to avoid divulging any secrets, only to wake up later to find out that this whole scenario was a test. He is then recruited by an organization known as "Tenet," and it is explained that there are two timelines in our world: one moving forward in a linear fashion and another one moving backward. To illustrate this, a woman working with Tenet asks the protagonist to fire an unloaded gun at a target. The bullets that are already in the target fly back into the gun. The bullets have somehow been inverted and are part of a timeline moving backward. The woman explains that in the timeline moving backward, an apocalypse is coming. In short, the protagonist's mission is to prevent this apocalypse from ever happening. It is also explained that someone is sending parts of this doomsday device backward in time. The Protagonist and his partner, an agent named Neil, trace the inverted rounds he fired to an arms dealer named Priya Singh, who operates out of Mumbai. When The Protagonist and Priya make contact, she explains to him that she is also a member of the Tenet organization and that the man who inverted the bullets, a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator, is also somehow able to communicate with the future. However, luckily for Neil and The Protagonist, Andrei has an estranged wife/art appraiser named Katherine Barton. However, that's a long name to type, so we'll just call her "Kat." Anyways, Kat is being blackmailed by Andre, who knows that a painting she had previously authenticated was actually a fake and could expose her as a fraud at any time and end her career. To get her help, The Protagonist and Neil attempt to steal the painting from Sator's freeport facility in the Oslo airport while a colleague of theirs drives a Boeing 747 into a hangar as a distraction. While they are there, they find two mysterious turnstiles in the airport and are confronted by two inverted masked men who jump out of them, fists and bullets flying. Due to the encounter and the limited timeframe, Neil and The Protagonist are unable to steal the painting, and they exfiltrate from the freeport. Back in Mumbai, Priya explains the concept of the turnstile, a device that can reverse the flow of time of whatever or whomever you place inside of it. Priya reveals that Sator sabotaged her Kyiv CIA team but that KORD (that hostage rescue team) got their hands on the artifact, which is plutonium-241, a part of the doomsday device. Kat doesn't know that The Protagonist failed to steal the Goya, and Sator doesn't kill him because, well, I'll explain this later because it's pretty cool. Anyways, they go sailing because they're buddies now, and because Kat hates Sator's guts, she tries to drown him. The Protagonist saves Sator because he needs him for the plan to succeed, and the two decide to cooperate to steal the plutonium. However, Sator doesn't fully realize that The Protagonist is still his enemy. The Protagonist and Neal successfully steal the artifact but are intercepted by an inverted Sator, who is holding Kat hostage. After a bit of capturing and un-capturing and re-capturing, Sator gets the upper hand and takes them all to another freeport in Tallinn that has turnstiles, where the inverted Sator interrogates The Protagonist about the location of the artifact, which, if you remember, is in the hands of KORD. Sator shoots Kat with an inverted bullet, but Tenet troops show up, drive the bad guys away, and save all of them. Kind of. Kat is still mortally wounded. To save her life and get the plutonium back, The Protagonist and Neal take her through the turnstile, inverting all of them, and go back to the Oslo freeport, where they meet their past selves. As it turns out, the mysterious masked man The Protagonist had fought earlier was actually HIMSELF, just inverted. Which I think is just wild. Eventually, they find themselves back at the capturing-un-capturing part and fail yet again to get the artifact, but Kat's life is saved, as because she's moving backward, she and the bullet are now moving in the same direction, so her body would have physically sustained no damage from it. By this point in the film, the good is that Kat is alive. The bad is that Sator now has all the pieces of the algorithm, which means he has everything he needs to end the world, and all he needs to do is dead-drop the pieces to future antagonists moving backward who want to destroy their past and everyone still inhabiting it. It is revealed that a place called "Stalsk-12" is where the dead-drop is going to take place. This is where Sator grew up, and this is where he's planning to end the world. Why does he want to end the world? Well, he's terminally ill and just wants the world to die with him and allow some of his fellow antagonists to escape the effects of climate change. Which is....a motive, I guess. Kat impersonates her past self to get close to Sator on his yacht, and Neil, The Protagonist, and other Tenet forces converge on the site, executing a diversionary attack that features something known as a "temporal pincer movement," where soldiers moving both backward and forward attack Sator's men. They fight their way to where the device is being kept, and an inverted soldier with a red trinket sacrifices himself, allowing The Protagonist and another soldier named Ives to extract the algorithm just before a bomb placed beside it blows it up. Back on the yacht, Kat shoots Sator. After the battle is over, and our heroes are catching their breath, Ives, the soldier The Protagonist was working with, is a practical man and says that they should all kill themselves to avoid letting any knowledge of the algorithm leak. However, they decide to compromise, and break up the algorithm to hide its pieces instead. Neil leaves to board a helicopter, but right before he goes, The Protagonist notices the red trinket on his bag and realizes that the mysterious soldier who saved him at the beginning of the film was Neil. Neil reveals that he was recruited in the past by a future version of The Protagonist, that they have actually known each other for a long time, and that The Protagonist had the authority to recruit him because he had founded Tenet in the future. Remember Priya? Well, she’s a practical woman and thinks that Kat needs to die because she has knowledge of the algorithm. But because The Protagonist now knows that he had in fact created Tenet,he kills Priya before she can hurt Kat, and watches Kat, who is now a free woman, take her son home from school.

What makes "Tenet's plot so good is how well it keeps track of all its moving parts. Every aspect of this plot is connected to another in some way, be it in the past or the future, and often in a very abstract one at that. One of my favorite moments in the movie is when Kat says that she saw a woman diving off of Sator's yacht and wanted to have that sort of freedom. Little does she know that the woman she saw was her future self after she had killed Sator. The first time I realized this, my mind was absolutely blown. And despite being incredibly complicated, "Tenet" is remarkably organized. Once all the pieces fall into place, it's pretty amazing to see.

Now, on the flip side, what exactly makes "Tenet" a bad movie? Simply put, it's characters weaken it. Nolan is a largely plot-driven and plot-oriented director, and the characters of "Tenet" are probably the weakest part of the film. They're secondary to the insanely convoluted plot going on and don't get fleshed out enough. Sator is a stereotypical Russian arms dealer. Kat isn't a very complicated character. And The Protagonist is literally named "Protagonist." Now granted, the plot didn't allow much time for them to be developed, but it's still a problem nonetheless. And because the characters aren't as complicated as the plot, this section is much shorter than the last, about as thin as the characters themselves.

All in all, "Tenet" is a movie that you need to understand to enjoy, and understanding it takes some brainwork and some note-taking. It's not a film you can just sit down and kill time with, and that's probably its biggest flaw as well as its biggest strength: "Tenet" is less of a story and more of a puzzle. It is to movies what a Rubik's Cube is to toys: it is meant to be solved, not necessarily enjoyed. However, once you begin to understand it, it becomes far more enjoyable. "Tenet" is a film I proudly own a physical copy of, even if its characters are rather weak: it's less of a story and more of a puzzle. And sometimes, your brain needs to sit down and do a puzzle. And once the puzzle is done? Then you can congratulate yourself on having been able to solve it.

Now, as for the question I left unanswered: Why did Sator not just kill The Protagonist right off the bat? Well, it's implied that Sator needed the Protagonist to steal the last piece of the algorithm, and that if he had killed him right then and there, he never would have gotten his hands on it. Christopher Nolan, you crazy madman.

Tenet - 6/10

1 Corinthians 14:33